Preface

The release of Magento 2 marks a major milestone for the world’s most successful open source e-commerce platform. This new version was completely rewritten, retooled, and redesigned to allow its merchants to move forward into the modern age of online commerce.

With this new version, many store owners will be joining the ranks of others who embrace the power and flexibility of Magento. However, like these Magento veterans, new owners will find Magento a bit intimidating at first. To be powerful, a platform must seem complex at times. To be sure, any top-end e-commerce system requires a depth of configurations, tools, and processes to truly be useful for merchants.

If you’re familiar with Magento 1.x, you’ll be happy to find much about Magento has also remained the same. At the same time, the core functionality that made Magento 1.x so very popular is now wrapped in a new and friendlier user interface. Workflows are improved and, as to be expected, much of the original functionality has evolved to be better than before!

In our work managing e-commerce stores and helping Magento store owners maximize profitability, we know that managing a Magento store can take a long time to master. We wanted to change this by condensing years of real world experience into a concise, easy-to-use manual that is specifically aimed at the Magento store operator.

Learning Magento 2 Administration is meant to be both a course of learning as well as a handy, daily reference book. In this book, our focus is on those who will be configuring and using Magento on a day-to-day basis. There are other great Packt Publishing books that dive deep into the technical development opportunities of Magento. Our book answers the question, “now what?” Once you have an installed Magento store, what can you do to give your store a competitive advantage? To leverage all the features of Magento? To operate your store efficiently?

We hope you find this “labor of love” as useful to you as it has been enjoyable for us to write. We also suspect you’ll find many nuggets within these pages that make it a valuable asset for your Magento-related endeavors.

Regardless of where you are in using Magento 2 — considering, planning, launching, or operating — we suggest that you start by reading through this book in order. Learn where everything is and watch, especially, for the Tips sprinkled throughout. Then, use the book as a basis for creating your own action plans for improving your use of Magento.

Above all, enjoy using Magento 2. Embrace it and you’ll prosper. You’ll soon join the ranks of successful Magento-powered online stores.